The Wandering Age: Last Rites

This is the current plan, don’t hold me to it - we’ve got a CTS: Wandering Age comic up today, called Last Rites. You’ll know what happened when you read it. Now, it has become tradition that we upload a sketch of some sort on days where we are gallavanting far from home. Hopefully you enjoy that sort of thing, but let’s be clear - they are fun for us to do, but I’m not above admitting there is a certain pragmatism to the format.

It is our intention to use the days allotted for sketching - that is to say, Friday and Monday - to relate the events just before today’s strip, as loose recollections. It seems like that might be a way to use the sketch concept in a fashion will that will be more than simply servicable. Of course, maybe we’ll get bored of it or someone will do something stupid, and we’ll be forced to catalogue it. We are going to the San Diego Comic-Con, after all. The odds of a man doing something shameful are really quite high.

I do not customarily wave a pair of pom-poms and engage in rah-rah Webcomic Boosterism, which along with our unwarranted success tends to preclude our involvement in community reindeer games. However! I’m fairly certain that cartoonists who work on the web pretty much run the show at the San Diego Comic-Con. Coalitions like Dumbrella go in together for a booth, and I’ll be Goddamned if I can even get in there to talk to those guys sometimes. The Keenspot table resembles a kind of mothership, which sorties of fresh faced cartoonists depart from on all manner of subversive missions. Look at Piro‘s line if you want to see something extraordinary - you’d think someone had discovered precious metals over there. The line For Penny Arcade is sometimes comparable to the lines of genuinely famous people, like Mark Waid, who is actually brilliant. That we are able to garner such enthusiasm doesn’t bode well for the prospect of a universal justice.

To add another layer of complexity to the already Escher-level contortions of our relationship, Scott Kurtz has invited us to some kind of panel on Sunday, from 3-4 in the nebulous “Room 2.” Hopefully that is enough of a descriptor, I have no idea where that shit is. Scott, his penchant for drama in perfect working order, has entitled the panel “Is Newspaper Syndication Dead: The Future of the American Comic strip.” We’ll be up there with Michael Jantze of The Norm, as well as Kris Straub from Checkerboard Nightmare, who I wanted to meet anyway so I guess this makes it easy. At absolutely any other time, we will be at our booth - number 1714 - should you get lonely.

Before I go, there’s a great article about the state of the PC games industry here at JoeUser dot com. The poster goes by the handle Draginol, but I have every reason to believe that he would also answer to “Brad Wardell” if pressed - Brad Wardell being the Stardock guy, who I praised not only for his excellent Galactic Civilizations but also the painless manner in which I was able to acquire it electronically. Apparently, he wasn’t finished usurping the retail channel.

Because I wanted access to Stardock’s beta software, specifically The Political Machine, I subscribed to a service they used to call Drengin dot net which allowed access to all of their games for the duration of your subscription. That concept has been updated somewhat to include games from other publishers as well, all distributed and maintained via a single host application, in a service called Total Gaming dot net. Apparently my old subscription transferred over, because I’ve got access to Celtic Kings and the complete edition of Disciples II with all the expansions in addition to the stuff I’d originally meant to buy. I’ll be curious to see what other developers cotton to his way of doing things.

You read his article, and he says a lot of the things I’ve said about how problematic and insulting being a PC gamer can be. The difference is that, in response, he went on to revolutionize publishing. I had a sandwich. I guess that’s the difference between us.